What is there to be said about bell hooks? She was an absolutely formidable force of nature for lovers, feminists and intellectuals alike. bell hooks was a cultural critic, writer, teacher, and activist whose work held a mirror to what we take for granted within our media, our ability to love, and our classrooms.
Through her accessible yet powerful writing style, hooks explored themes of theory, media analysis, and the intersections of race, class, and gender.
Throughout her life, she published around 40 books including Ain’t I a woman?, All about love and a variety of children’s books. I would recommend hooks to anyone: studying her work will allow you to reflect on how systems of oppression affect your own life, and more importantly, on how love can be used as a force to dismantle this oppression.
I’ve been lucky enough to have the time recently to explore a lot of hooks’ work, including a collection of transcriptions of her interviews. I’m consistently moved by her ability to articulate the human experience, and to make perceptive observations that feel both emotional and grounded in theory. Reading these interviews, which span from the 1980s to the start of the early 2000s, I noticed a pattern:
hooks consistently speaks to the interdependent nature of systems of oppression.
Referred to by hooks as “interlocking systems of domination”, she examines how separate systems of oppression are supported and underpinned by one another. The systems of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy reinforce and sustain each other, allowing them to form a dominating politic. In a 1989 interview, she neatly phrased this conglomeration of oppressive structures “the politic of domination”. Throughout her life, hooks was insistent on theory having a practical and grounded application. So, what is the politic of domination, and how can understanding it be a useful tool for social change today?
hooks explained the importance of naming these oppressive systems, using terms like white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy to help us ‘define our reality’ and accept that “all of these things are functioning simultaneously at all times in our lives”. Though the presentation of these forms of oppression may look different, their base, domination, is shared. hooks explains that“it’s like a house, they share a foundation, but the foundation is the ideological beliefs around which the notions of domination are constructed” (1989 interview – ‘talking back’).
Understanding the interdependence of these systems and their foundational notion of domination helps us understand ourselves and our own subjugation better.
If we look up from our theory books to the world around us, we can certainly see a multifaceted and interdependent politic of domination at play. Consider the rise of far-right strongmen across global politics; these politicians are characterised by sharp, dehumanising language, a dismissal of procedure, and the trampling of human rights. Their power is simultaneously a reflection of patriarchy, in the belief that they are entitled to dominate the public and political world, while stripping back women’s and human rights; of capitalism, a system that allows profit to dominate at the expense of human lives; and of colonialism, expressed in their clamouring to reinforce domination over the world.
This is the politic of domination within our real world: systems of oppression and power do not exist in isolation, but rather work together. In the same way, patriarchy, misogyny and sexism do not exist separately from other systems of domination. Our experience under the patriarchy is not just informed by isolated sexism. Domination and oppression expressed through systems of imperialism, institutionalised racism, capitalist economies, homophobia and even religion work to uphold and shape the patriarchy just as much as sexist ideals.
Not only does this politic of domination unfold within large-scale politics, it is also expressed in our personal interactions and relationships. After all, our personal lives and experiences are more often than not deeply political. hooks herself observed that:
“a culture of domination like ours says to people: there is nothing in you that is of value, everything of value is outside you and must be acquired.”
In short, a politic of domination shows up in our personal lives through the internalisation of domination, and the incessant need to consume and identify with the systems around us. When raised within these interlocking systems of domination, we become conditioned to dominate – ourselves, each other, our environment – in order to gain value. The cyclical nature of the politic of domination doesn’t just maintain itself at a structural level; it permeates into the deepest and most personal level of our relationships and sense of self.
hooks pointed out that on the other side of this domination is victimhood: “low self-esteem is a national epidemic and victimisation is the flip side of domination”. Fighting to exist and organise under a system of domination is exhausting, and without acknowledging and naming it, we may not know what to point to as the root cause of our suffering. When this sense of domination is so absolute, it is easier to think that low self-esteem is an individual problem or a weakness of character, rather than an intentional consequence of the all-encompassing structural web of systems designed to oppress us.
By naming the politic of domination and the interlocking systems of domination that shape our experiences, we are better able to observe the hold that it has on our lives and start to confront them. hooks explores in her works that this is one of the foundational struggles of the feminist: to recognise the patriarchy in the politic of domination and work to overcome the interlocking systems of domination that keep it rooted in society. But how?
At the core of hooks’ work was love: specifically, love as a deep and cultivated practice, rather than a flimsy, passing feeling that is situational.
hooks’ work on love as a practice rather than a fleeting feeling is an entire other essay of its own. Overall, hooks urges us to consider love as a radical practice of freedom. Without love as a purposeful way of life, our efforts of liberation are futile. Through a loving practice of feminism, we allow ourselves to see love outside of the parameters of domination that are inherent to patriarchy. Love as a practice means love as the medicine to heal oppression and as the foundation for collective action. Though love as the answer to oppression may at first sound surface-level and juvenile, using this as a tool to imagine a better world is revolutionary.
What would the world look like if we moved to a system that loves its members rather than dominates them? How would our justice system, schools, hospitals, and relationships with ourselves and each other look if love were at their core? How would our positions and concepts of power be reimagined? hooks’ work is so deeply moving because it encourages us to imaginatively and purposefully look to love and understanding to imagine a world beyond domination.
The excerpts of hooks’ interviews used in this piece are taken directly from the book, “The Last Interview”.
